Ken Davidoff Doesn’t Deserve Hall of Fame Ballot

It’s been a hell of an off season for New York Post baseball writer Ken Davidoff. First he writes a sleazy column bashing R.A. Dickey that had to come directly from the Mets front office. Then he said he didn’t vote for Mike Piazza for the Hall of Fame; not because of the unsubstantiated steroid whispers, but because Piazza just wasn’t good enough. Now he admits he might have made a mistake.

Too late, pal. Your Hall of Fame voting should be rescinded.

In a column on Tuesday, Davidoff said he may have erred by going strictly by WAR to rank the Hall of Fame candidates. Piazza finished 14th in those rankings, and since he was allowed only 10 votes, Piazza was not included. It should be noted that Davidoff voted for such inferior players as Kenny Lofton, Edgar Martinez and Tim Raines because they ranked higher on WAR.

But now Davidoff writes:

After speaking with several people I respect about this…yeah, I very, very likely screwed up… catchers obviously deserve unique consideration because of their supply and demand, and because the grind of the gig means they don’t play as much as guys at other positions and therefore generally don’t quite climb as high in WAR.

Davidoff fell into the trap into which many writers and fans have fallen — praying at the alter of WAR and not realizing it is a very flawed system. WAR is made up of dozens of statistics and is continually being tweaked. Therefore, a player who had a good WAR one year may end up having a bad WAR that year after the latest changes to the calculation.

Anyway, back to Davidoff. Shouldn’t he have done his research before he cast his Hall of Fame ballot? It’s not very difficult — I learned of the problems with WAR with a simple Internet search. One can only assume Davidoff has heard of the Internet and has access to it.

Davidoff has proven that he does not deserve the honor of having a Hall of Fame ballot (whether he deserves a baseball column in a major newspaper is an issue for another day). An apology after the fact does not make up for his incompetence.